America's Cross-Partisan Dalliance With Eugenics

A new book pulls the curtain back—but only partway.

- By Phillip W. Magness

IN NOVEMBER 1900, Jane Stanford forced the resignation of the noted progressive economist Edward A. Ross from the faculty of the university that bears her surname. The Ross incident has since become a cause célèbre in the history of academic freedom, setting into motion the events that led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as a safeguard for faculty rights and freedom of scientific inquiry.

Far less known is the occasion for Ross’ dismissal. Mrs. Stanford objected to a speech in which Ross appealed to the racial pseudoscience of eugenics to preserve California, which he deemed the “latest and loveliest seat of the Aryan race,” from the “stern wolfish struggle for existence as prevails throughout the Orient.”

Ross makes a brief appearance in historian Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia for his association with another eugenic concept: the theory of “race suicide,” wherein persons of “undesirable” hereditary stock are said to outbreed and out-populate the “productive” elite—a code for the white upper class. A century later, it is still difficult to fathom the extent that eugenic theory penetrated the ranks of the intellectual classes, in part because many people treat the tale as taboo.